Explosive Eighteen: A Stephanie Plum Novel (Stephanie Plum Novels)

me. “Breathe. And think about something else.”
    “How can I think about something else? There’s a dead man on the ground, and he has a handprint burned into his flesh.”
    “Think about baseball,” Diesel said.
    “Okay, baseball. Am I playing or watching?”
    “You’re watching.”
    “Am I at the park? Or is it on television?”
    “Television.”
    Diesel tipped his head back and looked up at a shattered slider that opened off a postage stamp–sized balcony on the fourth floor. I looked up, too.
    “I know of only one person who can channel enough energy to leave a burn mark like that on someone’s neck.”
    “Wulf?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you think Wulf pitched Reedy through the window and off the balcony?”
    “Everything points to that, but it would be out of character for Wulf. Wulf likes things neat. And this is messy. I can’t see Wulf throwing a guy out a window … especially in the rain.”
    “That would be more
you
,” I said.
    “Yeah. That would be more
me
.”
    I scanned the crowd on the other side of the crime scene and spotted Wulf. He was standing alone, and he was impeccably dressed in black slacks and sweater. He didn’t look like a man who not so long ago threw someone out a window. His hair was swept back, and his dark eyes were focused on me with an intensity that made my skin prickle.
    I felt Diesel move closer, his body touching mine, his hand at my neck. A protective posture. Wulf nodded in acknowledgment. There was a flash of light, some smoke, and when the smoke cleared, Wulf was gone.
    “He’s been doing the smoke thing ever since he went to magic camp in the third grade,” Diesel said. “It’s getting old. He really needs to get some new parlor tricks.”
    Diesel and Wulf are cousins. They’re related by blood, but separated by temperament and ideology. Diesel works as a kind of bounty hunter for the regulatory agency that keeps watch over humans with exceptional abilities. Wulf is just Wulf. And from what I’m told that’s almost never good.
    “Now what?” I asked Diesel. “Are you going to tell the police?”
    “No. That’s not the way we do things. Wulf is my responsibility.”
    “Whoops.”
    “Yeah, I’m behind the curve on this one.”
    I saw a flash of brown fur scuttle past me, and Carl crawled under the tarp that screened the body.
    “I thought you locked him in the car,” I said to Diesel.
    “I did.”
    “What the heck?” someone yelled from the other side of the tarp. “Where’d the monkey come from? He’s contaminating the crime scene. Somebody call animal control.”
    Diesel slipped under the tarp and returned with Carl. We hustled back to the car and got in, and Diesel took off down the street.
    “He’s holding something in his hand,” I said to Diesel. “It looks like a key.”
    Carl put it in his mouth and bit down. “Eeee!”
    I traded him a mint, and I took the key. It was sized to fit a diary or journal, and it was intricately engraved with tiny vines and leaves.
    “Is this yours?” I asked Diesel.
    “No. He must have picked it up off the ground.”
    “Maybe he got it off Reedy. Maybe he took it out of his pocket.”
    “I took a look at Reedy, and he didn’t have pockets. He was only wearing boxers and one sock. I guess he could have had the key stuck up his nose or inserted south of the border.”
    I took hand sanitizer out of my purse, and squirted it onto the key. Diesel cut across a couple streets, found Lafayette, and turned toward Marblehead.
    “Are we done?” I asked him.
    “If we were done, I’d be on a beach in the South Pacific. I thought we’d go back to your house, so you can finish your soup, and I can do some research on Gilbert Reedy.”
•  •  •
    Diesel peeled off Pleasant Street and wound around the historic area of Marblehead, following narrow streets designed for horses and foot traffic. He turned onto Weatherby Street and parked in front of my little house. The clapboards are gray, the trim is white, and there are two onion lamps on either side of my red front door.
    Glo was sitting on my stoop with her black sweatshirt hood pulled up and her canvas messenger bag hugged to her chest. She’s single, like me. She’s four years younger, an inch shorter, and she’s the counter girl at Dazzle’s. Her curly red hair is chopped into a short bob, and her taste in clothes runs somewhere between Disney Princess and punk rocker. Today she was wearing black Uggs, black tights, a short black